Book clubs in South Yorkshire

A wonderful old fashioned epic feat of storytelling.

After studying art in Paris, a young Bucharest painter returns to the holiday resort of her childhood on the border of Transylvania. In the small town of B. she spent her summer holidays with her upper-middle-class great-aunt under chandeliers and on Persian carpets. An island where the communist dictatorship was something to be laughed at. "No one can break us," her great-aunt used to say. In the meantime, communism is a thing of the past and B.'s best days are behind her. For the artist, it is a return to a world that has become alien, with which she is only connected by a few close friendships and the threads of her family history. When a desecrated corpse is found on the grave of Vlad the Impaler, known as Dracula, she realises that the past has not yet let go of the place - and that her great-aunt's motto is also Dracula's. Dana always wanted to write about Dracula Park, a big project in Romania, a kind of Disney-style gothic park, which a tourism minister insisted on building and failed because of the protest of the young Romanian civil society. But did this really banish the vampires in Romania? Is this morbid willingness of some people to hoist yesterday's dark figures into power a thing of the past - or still relevant? And not only in Romania ... The central question in the novel is how do you interrupt the expansion of evil? The book can be read in different ways: as a political novel, as a social novel, as the ultimate Dracula novel, combining Dracula myths and cultural representations in literature and film or as a love story.

This is a gothic fantasy that is part murder mystery, part coming-of-age romance. Lynx is a grief nurse indentured to the wealthy Aster family to ensure that they're never troubled by sorrow. When the Asters hold a wake for their eldest son on their isolated island, their secrets and fears begin to unravel, while bodies start to pile up. The idea for the book arose when Angie learnt that Victorian women in a period of mourning, who no longer wanted to wear black, could hire another woman to wear it for her. Angie took this idea one step further, asking the question: what if the wealthy could actually hire someone to grieve for them? The book looks at the relationship between grief, morality and class; lack of empathy and its consequences; political ambition; emotional vampirism; suppressed grief; and the societal limitations imposed on women.

It's a panoramic, unraveling masterpiece that deals with the best and worst of humanity, is a harrowing insight into the paranoia of global relations, as well as benefiting from the usual DeLillo humour, endless, poetic description of minor details and the human pysche. Brilliant book by a brilliant author.